how to include Angstrom symbol and Greek letters in gnuplot?

Question

I am using gnuplot and would like to get the symbol for "Angstrom" (Å, ISO encoding 305) and the Greek letter Delta (Δ, Symbol 104) in the plot. How can I combine the two encoding schemes when producing my output eps?

Answer 1

For readability of your code, why not use UTF8?

set xlabel "{/Symbol D} Δ (Å)"

Gives in PDF terminal :

with encoding to default but UTF8 as system wide locale:

gnuplot> show encoding

nominal character encoding is default
however LC_CTYPE in current locale is fr_FR.UTF-8

Answer 2

You can see the characters in this example:

set terminal postscript eps color enhanced size 10cm,10cm
set output 'pic.eps'
set encoding iso_8859_1
set xlabel "{/Symbol=30 a}"
set ylabel "{/Symbol=30 b}" 
set label "Label {/Symbol \104}{\305} End" at 1.7,2.5 font "Times,30"
set title "TITLE {/Symbol=30 \104}{/Helvetica=30 \305} END"
set key off
plot "-" with lines
1 3
2 2
3 3
end

The syntax for a character is {/fontname=size \code} so for example we have {/Symbol=30 \104} for the delta, and {/Helvetica=30 \305} or just {\305} for Angstrom. Ensure you have set encoding iso_8859_1 or similar to use the ISO Latin-1 encoding. See Enhanced text mode in the gnuplot guide at gnuplot.info.